Diagnoses per Encounter by Telephone, Televideo, and In-Office Visits.

INTRODUCTION: We sought to determine if there are differences between number of International Classification of Disease-10 (ICD-10) codes per visit before and after COVID-19 when comparing in-office visits and between telemedicine vs in-office visits, toward the goal of determining value of telemedicine visits relative to in-office visits. METHODS: We did a chart review study assessing the number of ICD-10 codes noted by providers at a large academic medical institution in 2019 and 2020. Only in-office visits were reviewed in 2019. The focus of analysis was on individual patient visits per visit type; however, a subset of patients who had visits in both 2019 and 2020 were also analyzed. We compared mean number of diagnoses for encounter types using encounter, billing and coding data. RESULTS: We analyzed 211,829 patient encounters. For 2020, 73% were in office. Mean number of diagnoses per encounter for 2019 was 2.65 (in office only), compared with 3.04 in office, 2.76 telephone, and 2.48 televideo for 2020. DISCUSSION: We found an increase in the number of diagnoses addressed during in-office visits from 2019 to 2020. When looking at diagnoses managed per visit, all 3 types of visits had similar complexity. These results may guide future reimbursement policy for telemedicine visits.

Some teaching resources using R with illustrative examples exploring COVID‐19 data

This article is presented in two parts: in the first part we discuss the use of R and R‐related tools when implementing a data science curriculum in the classroom and direct readers to helpful R resources in education, and in the second part, we demonstrate the use of R in exploring COVID‐19 data. In particular, we explore ethnic/racial distributions and COVID‐19 death rates. Supplementary R markdown files are also included allowing all graphics to be easily reproduced. It is advised that this article be discussed with sensitivity and mindfulness to potentially vulnerable students, especially as there may be students who have lost relatives due to the COVID‐19 virus.

Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on registered interventional clinical trials.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a dramatic impact worldwide and presented unprecedented challenges for clinical and translational medicine. We assess the impact of COVID-19 on submitted and completed interventional clinical trials that have been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. After classifying over 85% of the registered clinical trials by their source, we carefully model the number of submitted and completed trials before and after March 2020. Overall, we find minimal impact of COVID-19 on the number of submitted clinical trials, although a much more substantial impact is observed for completed clinical trials. We also show that clinical trials with a pharmaceutical sponsor were more successful at completing trials during the pandemic compared to the trials with academic/hospital/government sponsors.

African American Adherence to COVID-19 Public Health Recommendations.

By mid-May 2020, most of the United States had been under shelter-in-place orders for several weeks to decrease the spread of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). As states begin to lift these orders to reopen the economy, the risk of a resurgence of COVID-19 may be related to the public's voluntary adherence to public health recommendations. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 604 African Americans to generate a risk assessment based on African Americans' compliance with public health recommendations to frequently wash hands, maintain social distancing, avoid touching face, and wear a mask in public. This is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive study of African Americans and public health adherence specific to COVID-19. The percent of respondents reporting that they always comply with these recommendations was 72%, 67%, 55%, and 65%, respectively. Based on this threshold, African Americans' level of adherence with COVID-19 public health recommendations suggests they may be at high risk of a resurgence of COVID-19 during reopening, and there is an urgent need for targeted, culturally responsive public health messaging that is accessible to communities of color to help address racial disparities in COVID-19 risk. [HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice. 2020;4(3):e166-e170.].